Robin the American

 

 

“Robin the American” is a minor character in An Infinite History. He was a neighbour of Marie Aymard and her family in the old center of Angoulême, and the first cousin once removed of the paper merchant Abraham-François Robin, the “secret historian” of the town. His great-granddaughter was married in 1868 to the great-grandson of the bride in the marriage contract of 1764.

Robin was born in Angoulême in 1750, and died there in 1833. At some point around 1780, he went as a surgeon to the island of Saint Vincent in the Antilles – a neutral territory until 1763, a British colony in 1763-1779, and captured by the French in 1779 -- where he married a woman called Elizabeth Stubbs. The story, at that point, is recounted in a dossier in the Archives nationales d’outre-mer. Robin became “the manager of her family’s heavily indebted slave plantation. He then absconded – according to the  irate Flemish creditor of his in-laws – with ‘forty or fifty of the best negroes,’ ‘generally all the animals,’ and ‘even the copper pots and cauldrons used in the manufacture of sugar and rum.’” (An Infinite History, p. 106, “Akers, Aretas, habitant de l’isle Saint-Vincent, et Robins, chirurgien Français, 1783.”)

Aretas Akers is an obscure figure, who on his death in 1785 was identified as “formerly of the island of Saint Christopher’s,” “for some time past residing at Lille in Flanders,” and then “lodging at the Hotel d’Angleterre in Brussels.” (Will of Aretas Akers, PROB 11/1129/314.) His descendants later became prominent in British conservative politics, and some of the family’s papers are held in the Senate House Library of the University of London. One of the folders is called “Papers relating to the Stubbs estate (formerly Coubaimarou),” and with the kindness of the archivists, I was able to obtain images of the papers, amidst the lockdown. (Akers Family Business Papers, MS999/2A/1, https://archives.libraries.london.ac.uk/Details/archive/110000339.)

The folder of papers, like the dossier in the French archives, is again an account of Akers’ side of the story, and it tells a much more elaborate history. In 1776, Akers sold a sugar plantation in Saint Vincent to Michael Stubbs, and “was content to take a mortgage on the estate.” Stubbs incurred further debts, and died in 1778, leaving a widow, a son, and a daughter. But the son was of “so idle and profligate a disposition” – “un homme incapable,” in the French version of the story, also in the folder – that “many of the Negroes died.” Akers, “to save the family from ruin,” appointed a new manager and provided an “allowance of £200 for Mrs Stubbs, a house in town, and eight Negroes as servants to attend on them.” In 1780, the island was devastated by a hurricane, and in the latter part of 1781 “Mrs Stubbs and her son died – Miss Stubbs the only survivor of the family.” Elizabeth Stubbs then “proposed” to Akers that she would give up her rights to the estate, “her equity of redemption,” in exchange for a pension of £150 for life. “Writings were accordingly drawn,” and sent to St Christopher to be signed by Akers. But “before they could be executed,” “she got married to M. Robins, a French surgeon.”

Soon after the marriage, according to Akers’ story, Robin petitioned the governor of Saint Vincent – a restless figure, who had been born in the French outpost of Chandernagor in West Bengal, and was later governor of Sumatra – to move back to the sugar plantation and become its manager. Robin was supposed to repay Akers out of the proceeds of the estate, but he “applied the whole produce of the crops of 1782 and 1783” to “his own use and benefit.” He was then involved in “one of the most villainous affairs that ever was known,” in the hyperbolic description of a letter sent to Akers from Saint Vincent in May 1783, as the island was preparing to become a British colony again. Robin, according to the letter, sailed to Martinique (155 km away), and “brought an order to take off ten Negroes that he said were not in the Mortgage.” “Under the sanction of that order he carried off near 40 Negroes,” and the “remainder of the Negroes are now hiding about in different parts of the island.” “I saw the stock shipp’d off under the protection of soldiers with fixed bayonets,” the letter writer continued; the new French governor said that “Mr Robin had a right to take away the Negroes and stock by an order from Martinico.”

“M. Robin went with his ill-gotten plunder to Martinique,” in Akers’  narrative, including the copper cauldrons that had been stripped from the walls.  But there was a rumor, in the island, that one of Akers’ sons was on the way to Martinique, to make a formal complaint, and “it is supposed” that Robin had continued to another French island – Marie Galante – “though it is not known for a certainty where he is gone.” Akers himself was by August 1783 in Paris, living on the Rue St Hyacinthe, and hoping, still, for vengeance, or for “that Justice” which he expected “from a nation that are lovers of it.” (“Akers, Aretas.”) Robin, or so Akers had heard, had been imprisoned in Martinique. A little over a year later, Robin and Elizabeth were in Angoulême, where their daughter, born in Saint Vincent in November 1782, was baptised in the church of St André. Elizabeth signed her name, in a confident hand, “Elizabeth Stubbs Robin.”